1

THE ORIGINS AND EVOLUTION OF THE ENGLISH NOVEL

BETWEEN THE 16TH AND THE 18TH CENTURIES
TRANSLATION, POLITICS AND THE NEWS MARKET
José María Pérez Fernández (jmperez@ugr.es)

Visiting scholars:
Michael McKeon (Rutgers University)
Joad Raymond (Queen Mary, U. of London)
Alexander Samson (University College, London)

This course provides a series of interdisciplinary approaches to the origins and evolution of the
English novel that focus on its transnational and transgeneric natures. It will also take into account
the role that political discourse, economics, translation, the book market, and the emergence of
early journalism played in its processes of formation. We shall see how a variety of discursive and
generic typologies intersected in the development of early modern prose fiction—such as history,
autobiography, drama, news or the essay.

Students should become aware of the fact that the origins and development of the English novel
was part of a larger and more complex process, not just in terms of the discursive and generic
typologies involved in it, but also as regards its geographical scope. Given the fact that this is an
eminently interlinguistic and international phenomenon, the seminar incorporates translation
studies, and, in particular, the analysis of the role played by the Spanish picaresque in the creation
of new varieties of early modern prose fiction within different emerging vernacular traditions.

We shall study the way in which the early translations of Spanish picaresque contributed to the
creation of a new type of narrative prose which aspired to portray in a verisimilar fashion
particular cases that exemplified the realities of current social and economic problems and
phenomena (e.g., crime, adultery, theft, trickstery, poverty, vagrancy, or corruption). This new
type of prose overlapped with the similar rhetoric employed in historical chronicles, biography, as
well as the production and distribution of news. Both would also become important commodities
within the expanding markets of printed matter which frequently targeted mass consumption.

We shall see how the translation of Spanish picaresque fiction intersected with native English
varieties of prose narrative to configure a series of characters and plots which approached the
values and consequences of the emerging financial and merchant capitalism, in a gradual process
that led to the fiction of authors like Smollett or Defoe.

In turn, we shall also see how part of these subjects and plots also spilled over to the prosperous
market of 17th-century English drama, which flaunted appropriations from a variety of sources,
including Cervantes, and also incorporated characters like Moll Cutpurse, a female pícara inspired
in the life and deeds of an actual female trickster, Mary Frith.

We shall trace the impact that James Mabbe’s translation of Guzmán de Alfarache had upon the
English book and publishing markets, and how it contributed to the subgenre of rogue or crime
fiction, whose impact was felt throughout the end of the 17th century, the entire 18th century and
even beyond. The characters and topics that conformed this subgenre overlapped with the work
 2

of early novelists like Tobias Smollett (who was also a translator of Cervantes’ Don Quijote) or
Daniel Defoe, whose relevance is dictated by the fact that he created what we might call a female
pícara in Moll Flanders, but also by the fact that he was the author of controversial political
pamphlets, essays and also a practitioner of early journalism. We shall use Defoe’s pamphlet
Conjugal Lewdness or, Matrimonial Whoredom (1727) and his novel Moll Flanders as case studies in
which the picaresque, translation, journalism, and political discourse blend in at one of the
founding moments of the traditional canon of the English novel.

In this regard, this course ties in with other courses provided in the MA programme which adopt
gender studies as their approach, and also with another course which studies 19 th-century and
contemporary Anglo-American fiction. To this effect, we shall include some references to novels
like Erica Jong’s Fanny: Being the True History of the Adventures of Fanny Hackabout-Jones (1980)—
which establishes a parodical dialectic with 18th-century English pícaras and their cultural milieu
from a postmodern perspective.

The seminar will enjoy the presence of three visiting scholars who will provide different critical
and historical perspectives on these subjects. Professor Michael McKeon will take care of the
origins of the English novel and its development between the 16th and the 18th centuries,
focusing on Defoe’s Moll Flanders. Alexander Samson will deal with the early impact of the
Spanish picaresque and Cervantes, as their English translations intersected with other varieties of
prose fiction as well as drama in 16th and 17th century England. Professor Joad Raymond
will deal with the emergence of the news market, and the development in England of an early
version of journalistic prose, with a view to examining how this type of prose overlapped with
genres like rogue fiction. José María Pérez Fernández will coordinate the contents and
introduce the different types of methodological approaches employed in the seminar—such as
translation studies, political philosophy, or comparative literature—with a focus on English
translations of works like La Celestina or Guzmán de Alfarache.

Grading policy:
- Class presentations and participation: 50%
- Written essays: 50%

List of primary texts. Students’ presentations will focus on one or two of these
primary sources, in combination with some of the secondary sources and the
contents of the class seminars:

- The Pleasaunt Historie of Lazarillo de Tormes, trans. David Rowland (1586). Electronic
version here.
- Fernando de Rojas, The Spanish Bawd, trans. James Mabbe (1631). Electronic version
here, and there is also a critical edition available at the Facultad de Traducción e
Interpretación (FTI/M 860-2=20 ROJ PER jam)
- Francis Godwin, The Man in the Moone (1638). Electronic version here (transcription) and
here (original edition).
- Francis Kirkman, The Unlucky Citizen Experimentally Described in the Various Misfortunes Of an
Unlucky Londoner ... (1673). Electronic version here (transcription) and here (original
edition)
- Daniel Defoe, Moll Flanders (1722)
- Daniel Defoe, Roxana (1724)
 3

- Daniel Defoe, Conjugal Lewdness or, Matrimonial Whoredom (1727)

- Tobias Smollett, Roderick Random (1748)
- Erica Jong, Fanny, Being the True History of the Adventures of Fanny Hackabout-Jones [1980],
New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2003.

Some suggestions for secondary bibliography:

Beier, A.L. ‘On the boundaries of new and old historicisms: Thomas Harman and the literature of
roguery’, English Literary Renaissance, 33 (2003), 181–200.
Cruz, Anne J. ‘Sonnes of the Rogue: Picaresque relations in England and Spain’. In Giancarlo
Mariorino, ed. The Picaresque: Tradition and Displacement. Minneapolis, MN: U. of Minnesota
Press, 1996, pp. 248-72.
Doody, Margaret. The True Story of the Novel. Rutgers UP, 1997.
Fuchs, Barbara . Romance, The New Critical Idiom. London: Routlege, 2004.
Fuchs, Barbara. The Poetics of Piracy. Emulating Spain in English Literature. Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013.
Kesson, Andy. John Lyly and Early Modern Authorship. Manchester: MUP, 2014.
Kuhlisch, Tina. ‘The Ambivalent Rogue: Moll Flanders as Modern Pícara’, in Craig Dionne and
Steve Mentz, eds. Rogues and Early Modern English Culture. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan
Press, 2004, pp. 337-360.
McKeon, Michael, ed. Theory of the Novel. A Historical Approach. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 2000.
McKeon, Michael. The Origins of the English Novel. 1600 – 1740 (Baltimore & London: The Johns
Hopkins University Press, 2002).
McKeon, Michael. The Secret History of Domesticity. Public, Private, and the Division of Knowledge.
Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007.
Mentz, Steve. Romance for Sale in Early Modern England: The Rise of Prose Fiction. Aldershot: Ashgate,
2006.
Newcomb, Lori Humphrew. Reading Popular Romance in Early Modern England. New York:
Columbia UP, 2002.
Pérez Fernández, José María, ed. The Spanish Bawd [1631]. James Mabbe’s translation of Fernando
de Rojas’ La Celestina. London: MHRA, 2013.
Pérez Fernández, José María. “Picaresque”. In Oxford Bibliographies in British and Irish Literature. Ed.
Andrew Hadfield. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.
Pérez Fernández, José María. “Translation, sermo communis and the book trade”, in Translation and
the Book Trade, ed. José María Pérez Fernández & Edward Wilson-Lee, New York &
Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2014, pp. 40-60.
Pérez Fernández, José María. “Spanish Bawds and Quixotic Libraries. Adventures and Misadventures
in Early English Hispanism and World Literature”. Comparative Literature, December 2016
(68:4), pp. 370-388.
Pérez Fernández, José María. “The Domestication of Melibea: Recasting Spanish Characters for
Early English Drama”. In Beyond Spain’s Borders: Women Players in Early Modern National
Theaters. Ed. Anne J. Cruz and María Cristina Quintero. New York: Routledge, 2017, pp.
11-32.
Randall, James Gregory. ‘“The primrose way’: John Bunyan’s The Life and Death of Mr Badman and
the picaresque’. In 1650–1850: Ideas, Æsthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era, vol. II.,
ed. Kevin L. Cope, 1996, pp. 167-84.
Raymond, Joad. Pamphlets and Pamphleteering in Early Modern Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2003; paperback 2006).
 4

Raymond, Joad. The Invention of the Newspaper: English Newsbooks, 1641-1649 (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1996; paperback edition with new preface 2005).
Raymond, Joad. (ed.) with Jeroen Salman and Roeland Harms, Not Dead Things: The dissemination
of popular print in Britain, Italy, and the Low Countries, 1500-1900 (Library of the Written
Word; Leiden: Brill, 2013).
Raymond, Joad. (ed.) The Oxford History of Popular Print Culture, vol. 1: Cheap Print in Britain and
Ireland to 1660 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).
Raymond, Joad. ‘The Newspaper, Public Opinion, and the Public Sphere in the Seventeenth
Century’. In Raymond, Joad, ed., News, Newspapers and Society. London: Frank Cass, 1999,
pp. 109-140.
Raymond, Joad. ‘Describing Publicity in Early Modern England’. Huntington Library Quarterly 67
(2004): 101-29.
Raymond, Joad. ‘Cheap Print and Popular Reading During the Civil Wars, 1637-60’, in Robert
DeMaria, Heesok Chang and Samantha Zacher (eds.), A Companion to British Literature
(Oxford: Blackwell, 2014), 309-25.
Raymond, Joad. ‘News Writing’, in Andrew Hadfield (ed.), The Oxford Handbook to English Prose,
c.1500-1640 (Oxford University Press, 2013), 396-414.
Raymond, Joad. ‘News’. In Susan Doran and Norman Jones, eds., The Elizabethan World (London:
Routledge, 2010), pp. 495-510.
Raymond, Joad. ‘The Stationers’ Company’. In David Scott Kastan, ed., Encyclopaedia of British
Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 5: 83-91.
Raymond, Joad. ‘The Literature of Controversy’. In Thomas N. Corns, ed., A Companion to Milton
(Oxford: Basil Blackwell Publishers, 2001), pp. 191-210.
Raymond, Joad and Noah Moxham, eds. News Networks in Early Modern Europe (Leiden: Brill,
2016)
Relihan, Constance, ed. Framing Elizabethan Fictions: Contemporary Approaches to Early Modern Prose
Narrative. Kent, OH: Kent State UP, 1996.
Salzman, Paul. English Prose Fiction, 1558 – 1700: A Critical History. OUP, 1986.
Salzman, Paul. ‘Placing Tudor fiction’, Yearbook of English Studies 38 (2008), 136 – 149.
Samson, Alexander. ‘“Last Thought Upon a Windmill”: Fletcher and Cervantes’ and with Trudi
Darby 'Cervantes on the 17th century English Stage', in The Cervantean Heritage: Influence and
Reception of Cervantes in Britain, ed, John Ardila (Oxford: Legenda, 2009), 206 – 233
Samson, Alexander. “Lazarillo de Tormes and the Picaresque in Early Modern England”. In The
Oxford Handbook to English Prose 1500-1640, ed. by Andrew Hadfield. Oxford University
Press, 2013, pp. 121-136.
Samson, Alexander. “Maybe Exemplary? James Mabbe’s Translation of the Exemplary Novells”.
Republics of Letters, vol. 4:2, March 2015 < http://arcade.stanford.edu/rofl/maybe-
exemplary-james-mabbes-translation-exemplarie-novells-1640>, accessed on 05/06/16
Spadaccini, Nicholas. ‘Daniel Defoe and the Spanish Picaresque Tradition: The Case of Moll
Flanders’. Ideologies and Literature: A Journal of Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian Studies (Twin Cities,
MN), (2:6), 1978, 10-26.
Ungerer, Gustav. ‘English Criminal Biography and Guzmán de Alfarache’s Fall from Rogue to
Highwayman, Pander and Astrologer’. Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 76 (1999), 189-197.
Ungerer, Gustav, ‘Mary Frith, alias Moll Cutpurse, in life and literature’, Shakespeare Studies, 28
(2000), 42–84.
Watt, Ian. The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Richardson, Fielding, Defoe (Chatto & Windus, 1st pub.
1957)
 5

CALENDAR AND SYLLABUS

Session # 1
January 11th 2018, 10:30 – 12:30
(lecture)

Introduction to the seminar, methodology and the reading assignments

Translation and the construction of literary canons

Reading assignments (to be discussed during session #2):

- Pérez Fernández, José María. “Translation and English Literary History”. You can download this
bibliographical essay by clicking here.
- Pérez Fernández, José María. “Spanish Bawds and Quixotic Libraries. Adventures and Misadventures in Early
English Hispanism and World Literature”. Comparative Literature, December 2016 (68:4), pp. 370-388.

Session # 2
January 18th 2018, 10:30 – 12:30
(seminar and lecture)

1st part: seminar with presentations on the texts assigned in session #1, and the following texts.

Secondary sources:

- Pérez Fernández, José María. “Translation, sermo communis and the book trade”, in Translation and the Book
Trade, ed. José María Pérez Fernández & Edward Wilson-Lee, New York & Cambridge, UK: Cambridge
University Press, 2014, pp. 40-60.
- Pérez Fernández, José María. “Translation, Medical Humanism, and Early Modern Prose Fiction. Science and
Literature in Francisco López de Villalobos”. Forthcoming in Bulletin of Hispanic Studies. You can download a
previous version of this essay here.

Primary sources:

- Boccacio. Fiammetta (in Bartholomew Yong’s 1587 translation). For an electronic version of the text, click
here.

2nd part: lecture

(You can download a copy of the general contents of this lecture here).

Letter writing, metafiction and the picaresque. Translation and the origins of the novel

Session # 3
January 25th 2018, 12:30 – 14:30
(lecture)

Early Modern Public and Domestic Economies: Marriage, Poverty and the Social Spaces of
Mercantile Humanism
 6

Secondary sources:

- José María Pérez Fernández, “The Domestication of Melibea: Recasting Spanish Characters for Early English
Drama”. In Beyond Spain’s Borders: Women Players in Early Modern National Theaters. Ed. Anne J. Cruz and María
Cristina Quintero. New York: Routledge, 2017, pp. 11-32.

Primary sources and critical editions:

- José María Pérez Fernández, ed. The Spanish Bawd [1631]. James Mabbe’s translation of Fernando de Rojas’ La
Celestina. London: MHRA, 2013.
- Juan Luis Vives. The Education of a Christian Woman. Ed. and trans. by Charles Fantazzi. University of Chicago
Press, 2000. For an electronic version click here.
- Juan Luis Vives. A very frutefull and pleasant boke called the instructio[n] of a Christen woma[n], made fyrst in Laten,
and dedicated vnto the quenes good grace, by the right famous clerke mayster Lewes Vives, and turned out of Laten into
Englysshe by Rycharde Hyrd. whiche boke who so redeth diligently shal haue knowlege of many thynges, wherin he shal
take great pleasure, and specially women shall take great co[m]modyte and frute towarde the[n]creace of vertue [and] good
maners. Trans. Richard Hyrde. London: 1529? For an electronic version click here.

Session # 4
February 1st 2018, 10:30 – 12:30
(seminar with student presentations)

English pícaros and English pícaras? English literary hacks in the age of Shakespeare

Primary sources:

- Thomas Nashe’s The Unfortunate Traveller (1594). Electronic version here.

- Thomas Middleton and Thomas Dekker, The Roaring Girl (1611). Electronic version here.

Secondary sources:

- Ungerer, Gustav, ‘Mary Frith, alias Moll Cutpurse, in life and literature’, Shakespeare Studies, 28 (2000), 42–
84.

Session # 5
February 8th 2018, 10:30 – 12:30
(lecture)

Verisimilar prose: from fiction to news. English Rogue Fiction

Primary sources

- Richard Head, The English Rogue (1665). Electronic version here (transcription of the first part) and here
(original edition).
- John Bunyan, The Life and Death of Mr Badman (1680). Electronic version here (transcription) and here (original
1680 edition)
- Mateo Alemán, The Rogue, trans. James Mabbe (1622). Electronic version here.
 7

- Ben Jonson, The Staple of News (1631). Electronic version here.

Secondary sources:

- Pérez Fernández, José María, “The Age of Exchange: Translation, News and the European Public Sphere in
the 16th and 17th Centuries”. In Images of Europe. Past, Present, Future. ISSEI 2014 - Conference Proceedings, ed.
Yolanda Espiña. Porto: Universidade Catolica, 2016, pp. 40-53. You can download a copy of the essay by
clicking here.
- Pérez Fernández, José María, “‘Reasons of State for Any Author’: Common Sense, Translation and the
International Republic of Letters.” In A Maturing Market. The Iberian World in the First Half of the Sevenveenth
Century, ed. By Alexander S. Wilkinson and Alejandra Ulla Lorenzo. Leiden: Brill, 2017, pp. 101-123. You
can download a copy of the essay essay by clicking here.

Session # 6
February 22nd 2017 – 10:30 – 12:30

Joad Raymond

The Rise of News Culture

Part 1

These two seminars will discuss the following questions

1. What makes a story true (with particular reference to the narrative devices of The Life and Death of Gamaliel
Ratsey)?
2. How do pamphlets and newspapers work as objects?

- The Life and Death of Gamaliel Ratsey (1605). Electronic version here.
- Ben Jonson, The Staple of News (1631). Electronic version here.
- Joad Raymond and Noah Moxham, eds. News Networks in Early Modern Europe (Leiden: Brill, 2016)

Session # 7
February 23rd 2017 – 10:30 – 12:30

Joad Raymond

The Rise of News Culture

Part 2

Session # 8
March 7th 2018, 17:30 – 19:30

Alexander Samson

The Generically Uncertain World of Early Modern Prose Fiction

The question frequently asked in relation to the novel is what are the key features of what we understand as the
novel and is there anything essentially modern about it. There is no doubt it has been the dominant form of
entertainment over the last three centuries. Key scholars in this field, however, have made the argument that the
novel was a fully developed form already in the classical period (Doody). Others have pointed to naive empiricism,
verisimilitude, particular configurations of narrative voice, heteroglossia, interest in the workaday and subjectivity
 8

and its rise etc. In this seminar we will attempt to evaluate some of these claims by looking at what are seen as pre-
novelistic texts (Image of Idleness, Lazarillo de Tormes) and others that are fully incorporated into histories of the rise
of the novel (Don Quixote, Novelas ejemplares) and then plot what happens to these so-called innovations in prose
fiction in translation, where often they are toned down or excised and reassimilated to previous generic models
and expectations, in a nostalgic gesture that resists aetiological, rise, or evolutionary theories of the novel. Would
we be better off thinking in terms of plots?

Session # 9
March 8th 2018, 15:30 – 17:30

Alexander Samson

Lost in Translation

The vast influence of Cervantes and the picaresque across Europe by the 17th century masks the discontinuous and
generically hybrid way in which these fictions were adapted, appropriated and apprehended; from Rowland’s
casting of Lazarillo as travel writing to Fletcher’s appropriations of Cervantine anti-romance. The geographic
origins of particular fictions saw them used as vehicles for the negotiation of political and cultural relations with a
prestigious other which was simultaneously an object of emulation and disavowal. The rise of Spanish language
learning with Percyvall and Minsheu’s dictionnaries paralleled growing numbers of translations. The issue of the
vernacular and how it was to be framed in relation to past, present and future was at the heart of all the
experimental fictions in poetry, prose and drama in this period. How do the peculiar temporalities on display in
works by authors like Cervantes reflect this burgeoning sense of modernity, new kinds of desire, power and social
relations, and what happens to these configurations as they move from one place to another? Does the novel
necessarily travel, is it by definition a travelling text?

The Big Three:

- Margaret Doody, The True Story of the Novel (Rutgers UP, 1997)
- Michael McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel. 1600 – 1740 (Baltimore & London: The Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1987, 2002)
- Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Richardson, Fielding, Defoe (Chatto & Windus, 1st pub. 1957)

Primary Sources:

- A lyttle treatyse called the Image of Idlenesse, conteynynge certeyne matters moued be|twene Walter wed|locke and
Bawdin Bacheler. Tra~sla|ted out of the Troyane or Cornyshe tounge into Englyshe, by Olyuer Old wan|ton, and
dedicated to the Lady Lust. (PDF to be distributed)
- The Life of Lazarillo de Tormes, trans. David Rowland, ed. Keith Whitlock (London: Aris and Phillips,
2000).
- Mateo Alemán, The Rogue, trans. James Mabbe (London: Edward Blount, 1622) (PDF to be distributed)
- Miguel de Cervantes, Exemplarie Novells, trans. James Mabbe (London: John Dawson, 1640) (PDF to be
distributed)

Selected Secondary Sources:

- Anne Cruz, ‘Sonnes of the Rogue: Picaresque relations in England and Spain’, in Giancarlo Mariorino, ed,
The Picaresque: Tradition and Displacement (Minneapolis, MN: U. of Minnesota Press, 1996), 248 – 72.
- Barbara Fuchs, Romance, The New Critical Idiom (London: Routlege, 2004).
- —, The Poetics of Piracy. Emulating Spain in English Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
Press, 2013)
 9

- Andy Kesson, John Lyly and Early Modern Authorship (Manchester: MUP, 2014), 1 – 102.
- Steve Mentz, Romance for Sale in Early Modern England: The Rise of Prose Fiction (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006)
- Lori Humphrew Newcomb, Reading Popular Romance in Early Modern England (New York: Columbia UP,
2002)
- Constance Relihan, ed, Framing Elizabethan Fictions: Contemporary Approaches to Early Modern Prose Narrative
(Kent, OH: Kent State UP, 1996)
- Paul Salzman, English Prose Fiction, 1558 – 1700: A Critical History (OUP, 1986)
- —, ‘Placing Tudor fiction’, Yearbook of English Studies 38 (2008), 136 – 149
- Alexander Samson, ‘“Last Thought Upon a Windmill”: Fletcher and Cervantes’ and with Trudi Darby
'Cervantes on the 17th century English Stage', in The Cervantean Heritage: Influence and Reception of Cervantes
in Britain, ed, John Ardila (Oxford: Legenda, 2009), 206 – 233
- —, ‘Lazarillo de Tormes and the Picaresque in Early Modern England’ in The Oxford Handbook to English Prose
1500-1640, ed, Andrew Hadfield (Oxford: OUP, 2013), 121 – 136.
- —, ‘Maybe Exemplary? James Mabbe’s Translation of the Exemplary Novells’ Republics of Letters 4 (2015):
click here.
- —, ‘Lazarillo de Tormes and the Dream of a World without Poverty’, in The Picaresque Novel in Western
Literature: From the Sixteenth Century to the Neopicaresque, ed, John Ardila (Cambridge: CUP, 2016), 24 – 39.
- Gustav Ungerer, ‘English Criminal Biography and Guzmán de Alfarache’s Fall from Rogue to Highwayman,
Pander and Astrologer’, Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 76 (1999) 189 – 197
- Spanish-English Translations Database 1500 – 1640: http://www.ems.kcl.ac.uk/apps/index.html

Session # 10
March 14th 2018 - 17:30 – 19:30

Michael McKeon

Translations into English and the Origins of the Novel – part 1

Translations of the French and especially Spanish narrative genres, romance and the picaresque, exerted a major
influence on the emergence of the English novel in two important respects:

1) The texts themselves were literally translated into English.

2) The model of the pícaro's life was "translated" or adapted from these texts to form the basis for a particularly
English sort of plot involving wayward but upwardly mobile individuals in early modern London.

Primary reading:

1) Francis Kirkman, The Unlucky Citizen Experimentally Described in the Various Misfortunes Of an Unlucky Londoner
... (1673). An electronic version is provided. Minimal reading is as follows (please read more if you have time):
title page; "The Preface"; "[To the] Reader"; "To the Reader instead of the Errata"; Chapter I (complete);
Chapter II (complete); Chapter IV (complete); Chapter IX (partial: pp. 139-54: Note: here and below, pp. refers
to page numbers in red at the top left-hand corner of the page that are NOT in double brackets. For example, the
last page of Ch. IV (p. 54) is given as: [Page [72], 54]); Chapter V (partial: pp. 55-57; Chapter X (partial: pp. 167-
83); Chapter XII (partial: pp. 214-21); Chapter XIV (partial: pp. 257-61); Chapter XVI (partial: pp. 292-93, 295-
96. Note: this last page is mispaginated 196 not 296).

2) Sir William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England, 4 Books, 12th ed. (1794), title page; excerpt.

3) Daniel Defoe, The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders (1724).

Reading and discussion questions:

 10

1) How does Kirkman's autobiographical narrative combine the two senses of translation: the rendering of a
text written in one language into another, and the influence of a literary form or genre on the development of a
different form or genre?
How does Kirkman adapt the role and character of the Spanish pícaro to the conditions and ambitions of a
young Londoner toward the end of the 17th century? Kirkman rises to the professional status of a translator,
printer, and bookseller (publisher). How does this extend or develop (modernize? Anglicize? "bourgeoisify"?
novelize?) the typical life of the pícaro?
See above, p. [19], just before the narrative begins on p. 1:What are “errata”? How is Kirkman extending this
technical printing term?
How does being "unlucky" compare to the familiar, medieval and early modern idea of being "on fortune's
wheel"?
"How does Kirkman's adaptation of of the Spanish picaresque compare with the earlier adaptation by Francis
Godwin (see "List of Primary Texts," above, p. 2)?

2) Is Moll Flanders a typical pícara? How does a pícara differ from a pícaro? How is this difference extended or
complicated in 18th-century England?
How does the English social and historical context, including recourse to the American colonies, recast the
Spanish picaresque? Is Moll less a type and more an "individual character" than the earlier, Spanish founders of the
genre?
How would you compare the roles of religious morality in these respective cases? Is Moll an "English rogue"?
What's Defoe's view of how one tells the truth, whether as character or as author?
You've sampled Defoe's views on marriage in Conjugal Lewdness. What do you make of the English common
law doctrine of coverture (see Blackstone) in relation to these views?

Please feel free to ask questions and make comments during these two seminars. You’re likely to get more out of
them if they’re not simply lectures!

Session # 11
March 15th 2018, 15:30 – 17:30

Michael McKeon

Translations into English and the Origins of the Novel – part 2

Session # 12
March 22nd 2018, 15:30 – 17:30
(lecture)

Counterpoint: Early Modern Science and Fiction: Cosmic, narrative and social spaces. Utopia,
fantasy, romance and the origins of the novel.

Session # 13
April 5th 2018, 15:30 – 17:30

Students’ presentations and debate

Session # 14
April 12th 2018, 12:30 – 14:30
 11

Students’ presentations and debate

Session # 15
April 16th 2018, 12:30 – 14:30

Students’ presentations and debate